Following her acclaimed solo exhibition Profusione at Le Consortium, Dijon, Isabella Ducrot presents her latest textile series, expanding on the body of work debuted in Remembering flowers, at Sadie Coles HQ Bury Street in 2024. Titled Profusions, the presentation will be on view in the Sadie Coles HQ Kingly Street Viewing Room until 15 February 2025.
In her latest Profusions series (all works 2024), Isabella Ducrot positions the vase of flowers as the protagonist with newfound vigour, adopting an unrestrained and animated style that drifts from her earlier, more tender and refined approach. These mixed media collages now consume their environment, exuberantly extending to the perimeters of their frames, which are at times gilded in gold. Each work on paper is expansive and full, in bloom, as if crafted as an individual printed textile. Floral shapes explode into the pictorial plane, erupting from vessels kept at the periphery, filling the paper with cutouts of unnatural blues and tropical oranges. Ducrot at times employs a dense black outline to delineate swathes of colours, though more often, she embraces complete freedom of form, where petals appear as smudges of pastel or washes of pigment.
Despite Ducrot’s progression away from the quieter hues of the solitary still-life pots in her earlier works, familiar elements are retained. The quadrangles of chequered cloth emerge from the bottom of selected textile works, offsetting the welcomed unruly expanse of colour, detail and textural layers above. Ducrot cites the initial inspiration behind her enduring fascination with the grid pattern as Simone Martini’s The Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus (1333) as she resonates with how ‘The perpendicular lines and right-angles interfere with the sinuousness of the curved lines that dominate the painting, creating a clash, a challenge to the formal balance of the whole.’ This challenge to – or abandonment of – formal balance is brought to life through Ducrot’s integration of the chequered cloth into her energetic Profusions works. The artist relentlessly reinvents and evolves her artmaking, inviting those familiar with her practice to continually question and rediscover.
Isabella Ducrot (b. 1931, Naples, Italy) has exhibited internationally since the mid-1980s, including at the Venice Biennales of 1993 and 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Remembering flowers, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2024); Profusione, Le Consortium, Dijon (2024); La Bella Terra, MAXXI, Palazzo Ciampoli, Taormina (2023); other things, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2023); and La Bella Terra, Villa San Michele, Capri (2023). Her work has been included in numerous recent group shows, including Women artists. Paths in graphics from the twentieth century to today, Central Institute for Graphics, Rome (2023); Super Super Markt, Berlin (2023); The Drawing Centre Show, Le Consortium, Dijon (2022); Art and Nature, Museo Carlo Bilotti Aranciera di Villa Borghese, Rome (2021); Painting Stone, Fondazione Dino ed Ernesta Santarelli, Villa Lontana, Rome (2021); Io dico Io – I say I, Galleria Nazionale, Rome (2021); and Silent Transformations, BID21ART Biennale, Internazionale Donna, Trieste (2021). She is the author of numerous philosophical and art-historical essays, including the books Twenty-Two Places of the Soul (2022), Women’s Life (2021) and The Checkered Cloth (2019) all published by Quodlibet. In January 2023, the publishing house released a new catalogue, entitled Isabella Ducrot: Stoffe (Isabella Ducrot: Fabrics), an in-depth anthology of the artist’s exquisite collection of rare fabrics amassed over the course of her lifetime; presenting two hundred and fifty-two fabrics that originate from across four continents. Ducrot’s work is held in numerous public collections including Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte; Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome; MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; MAMCO, Geneva; and Le Consortium, Dijon. Ducrot lives and works in Rome.